I was looking through some old photos this week and I was reminded of something interesting; I was not a fat kid! I was cute as a toddler and I smiled. I looked like an athlete during my teenage years, a cute feminine tomboy cowgirl. My twenties were not bad either, or my thirties. My weight went up and down like over the years, sometimes I had more muffin top than others, but I never really looked like I remember feeling.
The Wikipedia definition of Body Image – “a person’s perception of the aesthetics or sexual attractiveness of their own body. It involves how a person sees themselves, compared to the standards set by society” (Wikipedia, n.a.).
My body image – overweight, tubby, round, rotund. It is how I think of myself and have for an awfully long time. When I was in grade school, maybe 5th or 6th grade, I remember distinctly an engagement with a classmate that brought the idea of being overweight into my awareness. She was teasing me one day in gym class about my mom being “fat”. Now, I never thought of my Mom as being anything other than my Mom. She was not a size 2, she was bigger than some Mom’s and smaller than others. To me they were all just Moms and what was important to me had nothing to do with the size of my Mom. This classmate was saying things intended to be mean and I just kept thinking, “your Mom is bigger than my Mom…”and wondering WTFrick is her problem. Unfortunately, I could not unknow what was introduced to me that day and two things stuck; what it means to be bigger than others and what it feels like to be bullied.
I have gone years without consciously thinking about my weight, mostly because I just accepted that I was bigger. I was an athlete, I was extremely active, I rode horses, I rode my bike through high school, I swam, I didn’t sit still much; from that one moment of discovery, my internal body image became warped and a struggle began.
At the end of 2013 I moved back to the Kansas City area. I have bounced in and out of KC since my college years and it has always felt like home, and my Mom still lives in the area. I moved back from California and had experienced some health bumps that were stress induced while living on the West Coast. My solution was to get out and go home, I ran away to peace and familiar for a reset. After moving back to the Midwest, I became focused on working out again. I had been a runner over the years, not a great distance runner as I am built to be a sprinter, I am all Quarter Horse. I liked running. I had given up running to “save my knees”. I decided I wanted to get really fit again, joined a gym and went to work. It was tough at first and I started in the pool because I had injured my Achilles chasing a horse in boots. Everyday I swam laps, eventually I added lifting to my swimming. After 6 months I started adding time on the treadmill. By the end of the first year I was feeling damn good and running again. When I moved to Florida in 2017, I was working out about 2 hours a day 6 days a week and I looked and felt awesome! Three years later I am not so fit and lean. Work, graduate school full time, going through a breakup, and life have gotten in the way. In 2019 I gave in to chronic heel pain and inflammation and quit running, begrudgingly.
During those last years in KC, I experienced outside validation of how I was feeling on the inside, FANTASTIC! I felt great and I looked good. Honestly, it felt good to receive those compliments. somewhere the switch flipped, and I started paying attention to my weight and body image differently. I went from being focused on being healthy to gradually being focused more and more on looking good. Over the last few years I have dieted and sought the magic formula to staying thin when I have not had the same time to work out. I have done keto, low carb, high protein and so on. I pretended it was about feeling good, but that is only a half-truth, it was more about being thin. I have been running from the belief that I am fat and that equals ugly.
So, I have been struggling with my weight and body image, looking for a way to remove my muffin top because frankly it does not look good in the mirror! I was hanging out with my mare recently and contemplating how my horse perceives herself. My girl is quite confident in who she is, and she has always been a lead mare, head horse in charge no matter the herd. She is never lacking good body image, she eats when hungry, sleeps when tired, rolls as needed, and just lives the life of a horse. She has good days and bad days when it comes to hypervigilance, but she’s pretty damn OK. I was also aware that when I look at her, I never think she looks “bad” no matter her weight. Going into winter she gains which is a normal cycle, I never think she will feel better about herself when spring comes, and she trims down. I look at her and think about what a beautiful being she is. I also realized she never looks in the mirror! She has no relationship with body image that includes her reflection. She simply is who she is. So, I have decided to take on her teaching around body image. I have decided to cover my mirror, I only have one in the house, and I will not intentionally look at my reflection for the next 30 days. Now let us be honest, I do video calls and drive a vehicle, I will see my reflection. The truth is that during those activities I am not focused on myself I am focused on the task at hand. The mirror in the bathroom brings a different experience, it’s where I brush my teeth, see myself naked after showering, and where I notice all the things about my body I don’t like and judge myself critically and harshly.
I have covered my mirror in quotes and mantras. I hope that if I have a giant zit or a bad hair day people will give me a pass, I certainly will not know about it. I want to see myself like Cleo sees herself and me, heart first. I cannot look in the mirror without seeing my flaws. If I were a young horse wanting to bite, the first thing I would do is remove the stimulus. For example, if I were standing to close to a young nibbly horse I would move out of his reach and ignore him, remove the stimulus. By covering my mirror, I am removing the stimulus. Yes, I know I will fixate for a short while about how I might look, but that will pass. So, I will visualize my body and touch my body in a holistic loving way. I will feel my stomach and my rolls, and I will send my body love and acceptance and I will embrace self-love and acceptance. I can say I am enough, now I get to embody being enough.
I have never looked at another woman I was attracted to and thought “I can’t love you because…” Now it is time to give that to myself. This is not a new idea; I knew I was enough as a child and it was domesticated out of me by society and reinforced myself. I guess in simplest terms it is time to return home to my beautiful loving self. My body is my friend, not my enemy and she deserves to be treated with acceptance and respect for all that she has given and will give.